Re: here is some stuff i want all of ya'll to look at even though you have better things to do.

Chris Bates wrote:

> If your school was anything like mine, they probably didn't cover even
> English grammar properly, let alone that of whatever Foreign language
> you were taught. I live in England, and the school system here doesn't
> even teach English grammar properly...
Last week, I read the Monster Raving Loony thread, and was intrigued
enough to search the archives to find out the meaning of the term,
which I thought was cool enough that I posted to alt.fan.pratchett
about it, using the following example sentences:

  1. BOB detonated the BOMB.
  2. The BOMB exploded.
  3. BOB escaped.

The thread soon became one about general grammar, especially after a
Swedish girl in the group (whose English is flawless, btw) raised the
issue of all the various aspects of textbook grammar that she didn't
understand. I did my best to help with her questions, although most of
the time I didn't know the relevant textbook jargon myself, but was
able to Google until I'd read enough to figure them out, more or less,
and have a stab at explaining them (reading phenomenonally bad
descriptions of textbook grammar on the web was an unavoidable part of
this process). I hope I didn't do too badly. Anyway, during the course
of the thread I URL'd the radio transcript of Geoffrey Pullum's talk
on the nature of prepositions on Australia's Radio National in 1998
<http://abc.net.au/rn/arts/ling/stories/lf981212.htm> because I
remember the talk (I was listening to the radio at the time of the
original transmission) and thought it ideal to illustrate a few points
about the nature of textbook grammar versus actual linguistics. Some
time later, I read Tim May's post to the Sapir-WhorFreakiness thread
last week in which he URL'd a the Language Log post written by none
other than Geoffrey Pullum, which woke up my brain! As a result of
that, I found Geoffrey's home page <http://people.ucsc.edu/~pullum/>,
and the upshot of all this is that I've put "The Cambridge Grammar of
the English Language" on my book wishlist, along with "Describing
Morphosyntax".

The twisted trails of linguistic discovery.

Adrian.

P.S. I know another Chris Bates, who is a geologist.